


Tumblr Ask Box

by collectivefandomstuff



Category: Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Batfamily (DCU), Ficlet Collection, Gen, Halloween Costumes, Humor, Originally Posted on Tumblr, Parody, Platonic Relationships, Rated T for language, ghost hunts
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-03
Updated: 2020-11-03
Packaged: 2021-03-09 00:13:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27365593
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/collectivefandomstuff/pseuds/collectivefandomstuff
Summary: Answers to various prompts/asks from my blog. Usually between 500-2000 words. :) Batfam-centric. Will update the tags as I go.
Relationships: Batfamily - Relationship, Batfamily Members & Bruce Wayne
Comments: 5
Kudos: 63





	1. Ghost Hunting

**Author's Note:**

> These stories are slightly looser narratively and tend to lack a POV, so they differ a little from my usual style of writing. Still, I wanted to keep them all in one place, and I hope you like them anyway :)
> 
> _**Anonymous asked:** I have two questions. Question one: which batkid would be most likely to hide in the vents and pretend they’re a ghost? Question two, which batkids would be most likely to completely believe the ghost thing and go off on a wild goose chase trying to solve the “ghost’s” “murder”?_

It starts one evening when Bruce is off-world and Alfred has invited (ordered) everyone to the manor for a cup of tea. Predictably, this soon devolves into bickering which somehow morphs into all the kids sharing stories about their time in the manor, trying to out-do each other. Here, Alfred starts telling them stories about the people who have lived in this house before; generations of Waynes long gone. One in particular, he tells them, a young woman called Catherine, suffered terribly through her life and died at the hands of a scorned lover in this very house. Sometimes, Alfred claims, you can hear her ghost wandering through the halls, singing sorrowfully or weeping.  
  
Damian scoffs at this and says that it’s “clearly nonsense”.  
  
And that’s when it truly starts, with one of the kids having the idea that “a few weird noises here, a fluttering curtain there… it should be doable to convince my pseudo-siblings that there’s a ghost.” Except this is the batfamily who are all complete trolls so it’s not one of the kids. It’s _all_ of them. Even Damian figures that “Drake is gullible” and it would be worth the trouble to scare the shit out of Tim.  
  
And so the great ghost-campaign of 2012 begins. Tim and Steph quickly pair up for maximum effect; with Tim putting speakers in the vents that plays a track he found online called “ethereal crying” and Steph taking on the role as “Catherine”, sweeping down the halls in a wig and a floaty gown and fake crying into a handkerchief.  
  
Damian, being tiny, crawls through the vents, playing recordings of a woman crying near wherever Tim is at the moment (doing this he actually manages to break one of Tim’s speakers. He doesn’t notice). When Tim is caught without airpods and actually hears Damian’s recording, he thinks Steph must really be working overtime on the ghost thing.  
  
Dick spends hours crouched on top of beams and chandeliers making sniffling noises, and leaves silk gloves with the initials “C.W.” embroidered on them on everyone’s pillows. Damian is the only one who notices, since only he and Tim actually sleep at the Manor and Tim is always way too sleep-deprived to either take note of or care about what’s on his pillow.  
  
Damian decides that Tim’s the one who left the glove and vows to double his efforts. Tim remains oblivious to the crusade against him.  
  
Jason sneaks into the Manor at night to leave fake blood on the floor outside the west wing. Cass finds him and convinces him that fake blood won’t cut it and they both get way too involved and end up “donating” their own blood to the cause. The blood is mopped up by Alfred before any other sibling can find it.  
  
Damian places portable air-conditioners on the coldest setting over Tim’s favorite spots in the Cave and Library. Tim starts wearing scarfs.  
  
Dick dresses up as a Victorian Lady and stalks the halls of the manor, lamenting “her” fate. In the dark, a been-awake-for-48-hours and high-on-caffeine Tim mistakes him for Stephanie and greets him way too loudly with “diD You GeT A nEW DResS?” This freaks Dick out entirely and he falls out of the open window he had been sadly mourning his death in front of.  
  
Jason and Cass get really stuck on the whole blood thing and leaves a torn-up, bloodied white dress on a hook in the library. Stephanie takes one look at it and thinks that someone has stolen HER dress and ruined it, and takes it as proof for a later date.  
  
Damian, slightly departing from the “ghost persona” in favour of torturing Tim, starts leaving thorny roses where Tim will step on them with bare feet, which is mostly in the shower.  
  
Tim starts questioning his sleeping-schedule and resolves to maybe dial back on energy drinks. He also puts everyones shoes in the freezer when they come over and return them to the hall before they leave, so they’ll think a cold chill has just passed along the floor.  
  
On the whole, they’re all too busy to actually notice what everyone else is up to -or get frightened by it. Bruce however, is not.  
  
Newly returned from off-world, he starts _noticing_ things. Voices in the vents, drafts in the cave, blood on the floor outside the west wing (that he has Alfred mop up). All the kids are fine, but obviously someone is breaking into his house. _Obviously_.  
  
This leads him to scour the cctv footage where he sees a strange, crying woman meandering through the halls at night. When he investigates the blood, the camera shows him a shadowy figure standing right where the blood was (Cass, geared up because both she and Jason takes this way, way, too seriously).  
  
His paranoia now fully woken from its (very light) slumber, he tries to find the hole in the Manor’s defenses. Late one evening, when he’s coming back from patrolling the grounds, he sees a victorian woman fall from a second story window with a scream and land in a heap of skirts. When he gets there, she’s gone (Dick made himself scarce, not wanting to be discovered by Tim), but a few days later, he thinks he sees a bloodied, ripped dress on one of the cameras in the library. When he gets there, it’s gone. Meanwhile, Titus keeps bringing him silk gloves with strange initals on them and he hears sniffling cries and singing _everywhere_. Finally, he reaches a logical explanation.  
  
“I have seen stranger things” he tries to comfort himself, even as he’s putting up fifty new CCTV cameras and lines the corridors with salt for good measure. “aliens. demons. the Court of Owls.” He researches ghost-prevention techniques and contemplates whether martial arts would have an effect on a non-entity. He buys iron and re-watches Ghost Busters. Finally, he believes himself both well-equipped enough to handle the threat, and well-informed enough to accurately decide what it is exactly (a ghost born of tradegy, not vengeful but possibly dangerous if crossed).  
  
Confident that he now has the situation back under control, Bruce holds a briefing with all the kids to explain and assign roles for the mission to get rid of the ghost. For years after the fact he vehemently denies this meeting ever taking place and tries (unsuccessfully) to track down all copies of the photos and videos his children took during the _six hours_ of ghosthunting he led them on before one of them (Dick) finally lost it enough for Bruce to notice.


	2. The Time With the Nun

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A Continuation of [this post:](https://collectivefandomstuff.tumblr.com/post/633484726045376512/cassie-so-have-you-decided-what-youre-dressing) in which Tim eludes to the fact that Bruce had caused a number of national and international incidents on Halloween over the years, "not counting the time with the nun". There were a lot of follow-up questions, but they all basically boiled down to:
> 
> _"Wait, what happened that time with the nun?"_

Ok, so Bruce did not, as some assumed, dress up as a nun. That was Tim. Now, the reason why Tim chose to dress as a nun for Halloween can be traced back to July of that year when Tim and Damian got involved in a heated theological discussion wherein Damian firmly told Tim that, as an agnostic, he was _barred_ from dressing as a religious figure. In all honestly the situation was a bit more complicated than that -there was a wheel of cheese involved -but that’s a whole other story so let’s move on. The point is, Tim was dressed as a nun and Bruce was decidedly not. He was, in fact, dressed as a pirate.  
  
Now, Gotham was partying like it was 1999 and the streets were teeming with drunk citizens in costumes of varying sluttiness. The bats were out patrolling in force, trying to keep in contact despite the fact that the lines kept jamming. They thought that this was due to high levels of phone use, but it was actually part of a nefarious scheme the Riddler was operating. But that comes later.  
  
Pirate Batman… Batey? Captain Blackears? Whatever. Batman and Red Robin were teamed up for the evening, with RR patrolling the streets while Batman cruised the seas of the sky, so to speak. The comms had been jammed again (by design, you’ll recall) and B was trying to get O on the line when Riddler struck. Batman had enough time to jump out of the way, snatch up Red Robin and take cover in a nearby building. B had just managed to identify their safe haven as a Museum for model trains and realise (as you likely have as well) that that probably meant they had just walked into a trap, before they were locked in.  
  
Batman took this with his usual grace as a father of five. He swallowed down the urge to bang his head against a wall and focused on Riddler’s voice echoing through the PA-system. There was something about being on the “wrong track” and at least three annoying riddles stuffed into the monologue before Riddler paused.  
  
“Did you bring a _nun_?!”  
  
Captain Batman rolled his eyes (he had refused the eyepatch because _really Dick? You want me to limit my sight on patrol for a costume?_ ), straightened his pirate hat, and turned to Red Robin to share an exasperated look. And also to subtly tell his son to keep up the pretense so Riddler didn’t know he had caught two bats instead of one.  
  
Except it wasn’t his son. It was a very upset woman in her seventies who was clutching a rosary and speaking rapid… Portuguese?  
  
Anyway, to summarise:  
  
After four hours of weird train-themed traps and riddles -two of whom were solved by the nun -the Riddler was on his way to Arkham once again and a group of visiting nuns, newly reunited with their missing sister, were giving Batman the dressing down of the decade. Because, as B learned that night, nuns fear God, and _only_ God.  
  
They managed to keep the whole thing from becoming a massive political mess but to this day Batman refuses to come within ten miles of the small mountain town that houses that particular monastery. Ra’s figured this out once and set up a base of operations there. B sent Superman to handle it, and now Superman won’t go there either.


	3. The Cryptologist

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aight, this one started with [this post](https://collectivefandomstuff.tumblr.com/post/624911157315174400/dick-jason-steph-and-tim-hanging-out-in-the), wherein Jason admits to leaving cryptic messages around Gotham to mess with Bruce, and continued in [this post](https://collectivefandomstuff.tumblr.com/post/625735882381623296/batman-at-the-bat-computer-scowling-at-the), where Bruce warns Jason about the new, dangerous supervillain "the Cryptologist", who is, of course, actually Jason.
> 
> All of which culminated in this ask:
> 
> _**theaskingguy asked:** that cryptologist thing is awesome XD mind sharing a few examples of his work and of Bruce getting tired of failing to decipher it at all? XD_

Ok, so weird cryptic messages starts showing up around Gotham, right? Nothing too unusual because it _is_ still Gotham, but Bruce notices. Strange messages usually mean one of three things; supervillain, organised crime, or both. These messages are a bit different than normal though. For one, Bruce _can’t figure out the code_ , mostly because it keeps changing. For another, nothing nefarious ever seem to be connected to them. Because there’s no immidiate threat, this mystery becomes more of a side project that he entertains whenever he doesn’t have to deal with Killer Croc or Mr Freeze or some other very real problem.  
  
When Tim first finds out about it, Bruce has found 5 messages. One seems to be braille, another morse code, and the rest are all a jumble of numbers and symbols. Tim refuses to help (”I have to go to Hong Kong tomorrow because _someone_ left me in charge of their company _Bruce_ ”) but he points out that the morse code, if you convert the letters to numbers, seem to be spelling out pi.  
  
Bruce becomes convinced that the Cryptologist is obsessed with the idea of infinity and eternal life.  
  
Babs takes pity once when she’s bored and manages to crack one message. She calls him and asks where he’d found that one. Bruce tells her that’s the one he found spray-painted on the wall of Pedro’s Diner. Babs says that that makes sense since, to her knowledge, the message said: “You haven’t had french fries until you’ve tried Pedro’s!”  
  
Bruce leaves “the Cryptologist” alone for a while after that.  
  
Jason, on the other hand, started this project because he had some downtime on patrol once and was feeling huffy. He made a code based on some poster he saw outside a closed down theatre and scribbled “Batman? More like Bratman, am I right?” on the back wall of a strip club.  
  
It becomes a habit mostly because he finds it insanely cathartic, even more so when he realises that Bruce is actually investigating the codes.

* * *

At one point, Jason uses the original braille but writes in Vietnamese (which the original braille is not conducive to).  
  
Batman finds a pattern of dots along a wall by the docks, painted in stark yellow. He figures it might be braille. Problem is, it still makes no sense. He spends three days trying to get it before he’s distracted by Killer Croc.  
  
_(The braille spelled out “row, row, row your boat, gently down to Arkham, merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, Batman is a fraud”)_  
  
Another time, Batman finds a code carved into the side of the Opera house. He spends weeks monitoring the building, worried that the code might mean an impending attack. Jason finds out about the surveillance and spends the same weeks sneaking around by the Opera house wearing increasingly worse “suspicious” outfits. He’s caught by Steph one night (Batman outsourced the surveillance due to Bane causing trouble). Steph takes one look at Jason’s fake handlebar moustache and goes “oh I’m so getting in on this”. After that there’s two strange figures loitering around the Opera.  
  
_(The Opera code is a mixture of coordinates, the first letter of the locations spell out a message that, if you change the letters to the third letter after that one in the alphabet, tells you that “Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen, Tod und Verzweiflung flammet um mich her!” When informed, Steph thinks this is a little morbid and convinces him to add “nine out of ten Gothamites want to know: do the butts match?”)_  
  
Jason’s pièce de résistance is when he graffitied the Police station. Big, bold, rainbow letters splashed across the façade of the GCPD, without witnesses. This means that, not only is Bruce stumped, but now Gordon is involved. As is the press, on account of this code being rather more conspicuous than previous ones. It doesn’t take long before pictures start pouring in to the Gotham Gazette showcasing the other codes. And before anyone can say “Vicky Vale insinuates that there’s treasure involved”, the hunt is _on_. Around the city, people are clambering to figure out these secret messages. Meanwhile, Batman, along with Gordon and the GCPD, is working overtime to unscramble them first. Jason is having the time of his life, leaving nonsense clues and sending cryptic letters to Vicky Vale. Tim, well involved at this point, takes to Reddit and 4Chan to set the internet on fire with red herrings and conspiracy theories. Steph, Dick, and Babs, who’ve all been let in on the secret one way or another, respond to Bruce and James’ requests for help with endless incompetence. Damian and Duke refuse to get involved to begin with. Rumours about the hidden treasure of Gotham spread across the country. Two Face is so caught up in trying to win the hunt that he messes up and gets brought in by two beat cops.  
  
It finally ends (sort of) when Batman is busting yet another megalomaniacal plan to blow up the city, a simpler feat then usual due to the sheer amount of people running around the city, posting pictures online of suspicious activity. He fails to apprehend the villains, Penguin and Riddler, but they both complain loudly from a distance about these new bozos flooding the city. Batman can’t help but grumble that it isn’t _his_ fault. Riddler scoffs and asks “isn’t the Red Hood one of yours?” Batman frowns and demands to know why that would even matter. Riddler and Penguin both look at him incredulously. When the Riddler speaks, it’s with a careful tone Batman isn’t used to hearing from him:  
  
“Maybe because “Red Hood was Here” is written in 13 feet tall letters on the Police Station?”


End file.
